[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Civil Order and Its Breakdowns (grad) (2/1/06; 4/1/06)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: Patrick Gallagher <columbia.ordnung@gmail.com>

To whom it may concern:

Paper proposals are being accepted for the upcoming Graduate Student 
Conference
"Alles in Ordnung?", to be held April 1st, 2006, at Columbia University's
Germanic Languages Department. The organizers would be most appreciative 
if you
would post the following on your graduate student list-serve. The 
deadline for
abstract submissions is February 1st, 2006. For further information, please
contact Patrick Gallagher at columbia.ordnung@gmail.com.
  ___________________________

*Grad Student Conference*

*Columbia University, April 1st, 2006*

*"Alles in Ordnung?" : Civil Order and Its Breakdowns*

History bears witness, again and again, to the collapse of the public 
sphere and
the outbreak of civil disorder on a mass scale. In recent times, a 
grotesque mix
of natural disaster, official incompetence, socioeconomic inequality, 
and racism
has made the fragility of civil order, even in the most superficially
developed-looking of countries, painfully evident.

We plan to hold a conference on the collapse of civil order, with an 
emphasis on
the ways in which such events have been represented in literature, the arts,
philosophy, and theory. We are also interested in papers examining 
instances in
which cultural texts have themselves fomented the political action of the
crowds, as well as in papers exploring ways in which cultural texts have
informed social-scientific and official discourses. Our goal is to 
explore the
reciprocal relationships between state, society, and culture and how they
constitute and/or undermine civil order.

We are looking forward to reading submissions about both the reality and the
fantasy of civil disorder, for which reason we encourage abstracts which
combine research in multiple disciplines.

***** As long as there has been civil order, there has been civil disorder.
How could civil disorders in variegated national and historical 
contexts, such
as the disturbances following the end of World War I in Germany, widespread
urban rioting in the United States in the 1960's, the May 1968 uprising in
France, the popular uprisings that contributed to the movements of national
liberation among European colonies culminating around 1960, or any number of
incidents from earlier centuries be related to one another?

***** How has civil disorder figured in literature? What are potential
relationships between texts that depict particular historical occurrences of
civil disorder and those that attempt to stage it in fictional 
scenarios? What
is the relationship between civil disorder in literature and the genres of
utopian and dystopian literature?

***** Is civil disorder "Romantic"?

***** To what extent can the breaking down of state legitimacy and civil 
order
be said to contain a structural analogy with the breaking down of 
traditional
literary and artistic forms with the emergence of modernism/postmodernism?

***** Civil disorder has also played a curious role in the history of
philosophy, at once central and marginal. "Disorder," "mob rule," and the
"pressure of the street" represent serious problems in the work of Kant and
Habermas, while, in the work of Hegel and Marx, the competitive structure of
"bürgerliche Gesellschaft" makes its collapse all but inevitable. What is
the role of disorder in defining concepts of order?

***** How has the figuration of the collapse of civil order in propaganda
either influenced or been influenced by culture and the arts?

***** How has the figuration of civil disorder in literature and culture
influenced public policy? To what extent do massive urban planning projects,
such as Hausmann's allegedly barricade-proof boulevards in Paris, take their
inspiration from cultural phantasm, empirical/scientific observation, or 
both?

***** How does the collapse of civil order figure in the medium of film? 
Recent
examples have included Roland Emmerich's Independence Day and The Day After
Tomorrow, as well as the Mad Max and Terminator series. Outside of science
fiction, Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of
Algiers also figure prominently.

  _________________________________

Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words by February 1st, 2006 to
columbia.ordnung@gmail.com. Paper drafts will be due by March 6, 2006.



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